Thread

Re: Why Postgres (was Re: [HACKERS] custom types and optimization)

Herouth Maoz <herouth@oumail.openu.ac.il> — 1998-06-01T09:56:09Z

At 7:12 +0300 on 1/6/98, Bruce Momjian wrote:


> Users, we need to hear from you on this, and why you chose to use
> PostgreSQL.  We don't need people foaming at the mouth, but we do need
> our users to give use good visibility and publicity.

Here is my story:

We needed to write some web-based applications, and they needed to rely on
a database, as the data stored in them needed something more complex than
ndbm.

The head of my programming team said PostgreSQL. Our sysadmin insisted on
deciding from a list of alternatives. So I set about with three main goals:
(1) ANSI compatibility (the more compatibility, the less migration pain in
case migration was needed). (2) Support for multiuser access. (3)
Interfaces to Perl and Java.

I saw the MySQL page. It seemed to be more ANSI compatible. We downloaded
it, and then it turned out that MySQL doesn't support transactions.

No transactions? That means no multiuser access. We want people to be able
to update the database. That immediately classified MySQL as "not a real
database", and put us back on the PostgreSQL route, as no other free
database was even close to the required feature list.

PostgreSQL has all the interfaces we need, it supports transactions and
locks, it is becoming more ANSI compatible with every version update, and
it seems to perform well enough.

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma